San Francisco has more than 65 privately developed spaces that are open to the public. No two are alike, and not all are readily apparent. Some are on rooftops; some are tucked inside buildings. Others are hidden in plain sight, easy to walk by without a second glance.

The city’s Planning Department has a web page devoted to these spaces — here’s the interactive map – and the civic advocacy organization SPUR has a similar guide that even rates each site as of 2009. I’ve written about the nooks on several occasions, including the need to keep them looking good as they age.

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“Indeed, ‘most physical assaults committed against women and men by intimates are relatively minor and consist of pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping, and hitting,’” Sotomayor wrote, quoting a Department of Justice report. “Minor uses of force may not constitute ‘violence’ in the generic sense. … But an act of this nature is easy to describe as ‘domestic violence,’ when the accumulation of such acts over time can subject one intimate partner to the other’s control. If a seemingly minor act like this draws the attention of authorities and leads to a successful prosecution for a misdemeanor offense, it does not offend common sense or the English language to characterize the resulting conviction as a ‘misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.’”

HAMILTON CITY, Calif. — A shallow inland sea spreads across more than 160 square miles, speckled with egrets poking for crayfish among jewel-green rice shoots.

The flooded fields could be mistaken for the rice paddies of Vietnam or southern China, but this is Northern California at the onset of severe drought.

The scene is a testament to the inequities of California's system of water rights, a hierarchy of haves as old as the state.

Thanks to seniority, powerful Central Valley irrigation districts that most Californians have never heard of are at the head of the line for vast amounts of water, even at the expense of the environment and the rest of the state.

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